Bill's Notes

(NOTE: Re-written)

I should note that I was initially in favor of giving Bill Clinton a pass on the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal. Later, I reversed my position, but I soon reversed myself again, and came to believe that yes, Bill Clinton should've been given a pass, just as I initially thought (and all during impeachment — my reassessment was a couple of years later).

In fact, I'm usually in favor of giving people passes and the benefit of the doubt in certain circumstances. Grace is more important than law, and to me, a pardon can be a good thing, particularly when situations are highly partisan and most likely to be motivated by political score-settling.

The pardon/commutation in largely terms is what's known as a deux ex machina — someone just friggin intervenes and that's that. It's not the most elegant solution, but sometimes, it's necessary. I was in favor of the pardon of Nixon, too. Read Moliere's Tartuffe for a good example.

So yeah, Scooter Libby should get a pass on prison, too.

I understand the charges are serious — sorta. There are two sides to every story, but what I saw was just-another-game-of-political-gotcha. I usually ignore such things, as I ignored all the Clinton scandals, because it's usually just entertainment for those who like to be perpetually outraged.

Sometimes, things get out of hand. Watergate was a little out of hand, but there's still context, and now we know that Mark Felt of the FBI sunk the Nixon presidency not so much out of idealism as revenge. If Nixon had picked Felt for FBI director, Watergate wouldn't have happened, IMHO.

It's difficult outside the beltway to get a sense of the real issues at stake — that is, the bureaucratic and political infighting that goes on in DC. Without meeting the people, it's hard to know really who they really are. All I can tell you is things are not what they seem, are rarely what they seem, unless they are ... that is to say, we out here in flyover country have a hard time determining what's going on.

Now I met Joe Wilson a couple of times as a PCV in Gabon and knew him to be someone with an unjustified confidence in his own opinion and a mammoth ego. I've also met many folks from the diplomatic corps, and they tend to have a similar sense of entitlement and similarly elephantine egos.

I could care less that Valerie Plame was outed — (by the way, it was Richard Armitage, not Scooter Libby, who outed Plame — that gets lost in the discussion). Dems simply used this to apply political pressure on the GOP/Bush through the justice system. Just like the GOP did to Clinton (which pissed me off). And just like the Dems did to Bush I and Reagan, and Nixon.

FWIW.

* Don't comment and tell me that Plame was on a critical assignment in the War on Terror. Unless you know the entire CIA strategy for her mission, and her role in it, and the redundant systems, and all that — which you don't, because you can't, don't bother. What comes out of DC is usually politically motivated factoids, devoid of context, that people use to club each other with. Plus, as I said before, Armitage outed Plame — so this isn't about that. This is about Libby's lack of candor during a grand jury investigation. Very similar to Clinton's. And since I thought Clinton should've gotten a pass, I'm not inconsistent when I say Libby should have gotten a partial pass here.